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Kylie asks Josephine to look into it. Fifteen years since she last saw her clan, she could find them again.
Find her mother again.
Cullen and Leliana offer too, but Josephine was the one who was kind; the one who asked if she was being treated alright, the one who shielded her from the worst of the rumors. The one who, nearly overnight, removed the term knife-ear from all but Haven’s most stubborn occupants even when Kylie told her not to worry, told her she could handle it. Josephine’s the one she trusts with this.
"Of course, Mistress Lavellan," Josephine says.
Kylie hesitates; she sits in Josephine’s office sometimes, quietly out of sight in a darkened corner while Josephine meets with dignitaries and Kylie simply listens and absorbs the Game. She’s learned enough by now to know that sending the Inquisition on a personal matter for an elf (even if that elf is the Herald of Andraste) might not be received well, and that’s a knot Josephine doesn’t need on her pile of things to untangle.
Josephine smiles, genuine kindness in her eyes, understanding Kylie’s concerns without even a word spoken. "My resources tell me that the Lavellan clan is strong, and should be a useful ally for the Inquisition. That they are your family should be a secondary concern to anyone interested in how the Inquisition chooses to spend its resources."
"Thank you, Josephine." She stands and opens the heavy door.
"You are welcome. I will let you know as soon as I have news."
***
You wonder sometimes, in the way that everyone wonders sometimes, how you got so lucky. You shouldn’t be this emotional over a basket of berries - and you aren’t, not really, it’s far more than the berries - and instead of crying into your fruit, you set the berries aside and kiss him.
Of course they wouldn’t abandon you. It just took time for news to reach them that you were the one to survive, and it took time for their messages to be sorted out, and it took time for him to travel to Haven. You knew you wouldn’t be left alone, not by Krem, not by the Chief, not by any of them.
But having solid proof in front of you, in your arms, kissing you, means that you can relax, breathe, feel a little like the world’s going to right itself again.
His fingertips grasp the edge of your tunic and lift it over your head. You reach for his but he stops you, brushes your hair out of your eyes, cups your cheeks and pulls you toward him for a kiss. Until you had a glimpse of it in the past weeks, you couldn’t remember what it was like before him, before his touch and his kiss, before you were waking up to this beautiful man beside you every morning. You’re glad it was only fleeting.
He splays one hand on your bare shoulders and gently lays you backward on the bed, and you realize. You always knew he was alive; even when you were crawling out of the ash and fighting demons, you knew he was alive. They heard about the explosion first, you’re certain; news of your survival came later, and you wonder how drunk they all were when that message finally came, how much drunker they all got in celebration.
There was a time, short maybe but still a time, when he thought you might be dead. You want to kiss him, hold him, whisper that you love him and apologize for that horrible and uncertain time. But he’s pulled your leggings off, and you’re helping him tug down your smallclothes, and the two of you aren’t statement people; sweeping declarations and putting feelings to words aren’t your style.
Though he’s focused on your breasts now, making you squirm and gasp with every touch and lick, you know this will end with him celebrating the victory of your survival with your legs hooked on his shoulders and his tongue between your thighs.
***
The Breach is sealed.
Haven is celebrating, villagers dancing and drinking and playing music, because the hole in the sky is no more.
But her hand is still marked, and Kylie isn’t quite ready to call this a victory. Closing the Breach didn’t close all the other rifts, she’s certain, and it didn’t bring them any closer to knowing who ripped open the sky in the first place.
She accepts the wine bottle Krem dangles in front of her and takes a swig as he sits on the stone wall beside her. "Thanks," she says, and hands it back. She doesn’t want much more than a sip or two, not when her hand is tingling beneath her glove the way it does when she gets close to a rift. Sealing rifts is something she could do in her sleep now, but fighting the demons that fall out of them - that requires a slightly-clearer head than what half a bottle of wine will allow.
"Bit too easy, wasn’t it?" Krem covers her right hand with his left, twining their fingers together. It’s not that he’s a pessimist, he’d like it if it were as easy as lots of mages focusing their magic while Kylie presses her palm to the heavens. He’s just been in enough fights to know when one isn’t over yet.
None of this has been particularly easy, but she nods. Her palm itches. "I’m hoping for once it really was that simple." One can still hope while still accepting the reality that one’s hope will likely be crushed within the next hour.
He slides his hand further across the stone, circling his arm loosely around her waist, and looks up at the sky. Clear now, though a bit clouded by smoke from the celebration, stars glittering against the bright moon. Maybe she’s right. Maybe this time it was that easy.
***
She’s standing solid, listening to Cullen tell her what she already knows, when Chancellor Roderick speaks up, mentions a path around the village.
You’ve heard about Roderick and don’t much care for the man - "chain her" comes to mind - but she listens, gives him a chance. He’s on his death bed, no reason to lead them astray now. She’s attentive and focused, but the ramrod straightness of her spine gives her away, and so do her clenched fists.
This only ends one way, and you aren’t going to like what she says when she turns to you.
Your heart pounds against your chest, a protest ready on your lips, a selfish protest you know can’t be voiced.
It’s a thing you’ll learn to live with, the My Girlfriend Is The Inquisitor And Sometimes Has To Stand Alone In Front Of Dragons thing. You’ll never learn to like it, but you’ll learn to deal with it, learn how to keep the worry at a low simmer instead of a rolling boil, learn how to keep yourself occupied between when she leaves and when she comes home.
(that she’ll always come home isn’t something you learn until the Inquisition has disbanded, faded into history, and the two of you are much older, though still roaming free with The Chargers. She always comes back.
But you’ll learn that later.
Until then, you worry.)
She blinks at you, and it’s all you can do not to reach out, grab her hand and pull her toward you and kiss her as deeply as you feel. That’s a little dramatic for the two of you, even with an avalanche, even with a dragon flying overhead.
Instead she comes to you, and the others turn and step away, giving you as much space as they can inside the crowded Chantry. Your armor clanks against hers when you hug her, but it’s barely noticeable among the panic of the villagers.
There’s not much time, but you steal a few seconds for a small kiss, her lips warm and soft against yours.
"Be safe," you say, brushing your lips to her temple. Anything else would sound too much like a goodbye.
"You too."
And then you’re ushered out the door.
***
Kylie wakes up cold and numb.
Blinks. Once, twice, three times. Figures out what direction up is.
Her left arm’s definitely broken, her right shoulder isn’t where it should be, and there’s a distinctive torn feeling across her stomach and ribs. She manages to get her feet underneath her and immediately cries out; she fights hard against a wave of nausea, leaning her forehead against the ice. One deep breath and then another - less deep than the first, the first one hurt too badly to try again - and she turns her body, resting her back against the icy wall. With a slow push of her legs, she makes it to standing.
Her world tilts, and for a moment she’s seeing double, but slowly everything steadies.
She doesn’t know where she is, but her staff is lying on the ground beside her unharmed, and she isn’t bleeding too badly from anywhere she can see. She squats down, keeping her left hand against the wall for balance, and picks up her staff. Gripping it hard sends bolts of pain through her shoulder, but she can hold onto it, even lean on it a bit for support.
If she runs into any enemies, she’s probably screwed. But she can put one foot in front of the other, like she always has. And there’s only one direction to go.
The sun never comes up once she makes it outside and past the demons - not quite as screwed as she thought, but now fighting hunger pangs on top of the pain - so she’s reasonably sure that, despite the interminable and slow slog through the blizzard, she’s not wandering lost in the mountains for days.
Hours, maybe. Not counting however long she was knocked out in the cave.
(Best not to think about that. Best not to think about where she landed when the snow came down, where Corypheus is, where her friends and the rest of the Inquisition are. Definitely best not to think if she’s going around in circles.)
The remains of the campfire look familiar, and for two dreadful minutes, she worries that she has gone around in a circle. But the coals are warm. Lying down beside the embers seems like a good idea, the best idea, and she still has enough wits about her to know that lying down beside the embers is a terrible idea, so she backs away.
One foot in front of the other.
Ten steps later, she’s following faint tracks down the slope, and she trips. Her foot catches on a rock and she stumbles, lands on her knees. Pain explodes throughout her body as she hears shouts from below, but she has no energy left to fight the blackness pushing on the edges of her vision.
"Stay with me," Krem whispers, his fingertips warm on her cold cheeks.
///
They were in Ostwick, that first summer she was with the Chargers.
(only they weren’t Bull’s Chargers then, they were just her and Rocky and Grim and Bull and assorted temporary strays they picked up by necessity)
Bull told Rocky not to blow anything up, Kylie not to get into trouble, and Grim to keep an eye on both of them, and went off to meet their contact for the job. She spent a few coins she found in her pockets on a small paper bag full of summer berries, and sat down at the edge of the docks, her feet dangling over the warm stone just above the water.
Chief was teaching her how to pay attention to more than what she sees; pick out the overly hushed voices in a crowd, recognize that someone in rags shouldn’t smell like fresh flowers, listen for the telltale drag of a stick that means staff instead of crutch, feel when something’s wrong. She closed her eyes and listened and smelled and tasted.
She heard the tone first. Harsh and angry, growing louder but not closer. The words came second - furious elvhen cursing, spitting at the feet of a merchant. She opened her eyes and looked around, found the argument. A young boy, barely ten, accused by the merchant of stealing.
Maybe it wasn’t quite staying out of trouble, but she jumped to her feet, knocking the rest of her berries over, and pretended to be the boy’s sister and offered to pay the merchant properly if he’d let the boy go. Though her skin was darker than his, and her face tattooed and his clothes obviously from the alienage, the merchant believed her and agreed.
She’d escorted the boy back, pretending to scold him until they were out of earshot of the merchant, and returned him to his family. His relieved mother greeted them at the entrance, tried to show her thanks by inviting Kylie in to share in their evening meal. But Kylie’d been to alienages before, slept in them when she needed a solid roof over her head or a place to lay low and vanish for a few days, and food wasn’t something the city elves had in abundance, even for as clean and well-off as Ostwick’s alienage appeared to be.
So she declined, but did ask after her clan, or if they’d seen any Dalish at all recently.
The answer was no, as it had been every time she asked for the three years prior. She didn’t expect any news, but the disappointment settled on her shoulders as she said goodbye and left for the docks and the others. It was dusk by the time she made it back, the remains of her berries long picked over by birds and street urchins, and her three companions were waiting for her.
"Everything okay, Sparks?" the Chief asked.
"Yeah," she said, using the oncoming night to mask her disappointment from the other two. Chief would notice, but there was a chance Rocky and Grim wouldn’t. "Let’s go."
She blamed it on distance; Ostwick was far to the south from where she left her clan, further south than they would ever travel. Maybe it wasn’t worth the inevitable disappointment and sadness to keep asking, not when she was so far away from any hope of finding her mother.
She tried again in Kirkwall, nearly got a knife in her spine when one of the elves recognized her staff for what it was - you’ll bring the Templars here, they all hissed, and she found out years later they were hiding their own mages at the time. But outside the alienage, hidden in plain sight in the crowded Lowtown market, she was told no one had seen a Dalish elf in years before she arrived.
When work brought the Chargers across the sea, she stopped asking.
///
Sunshine, finally.
Your room is on the wrong side of the tower for sun this time of year. It gets plenty bright enough during the day, but never quite the piercing warmth you miss from spending most of your days outside. The healers have stopped fussing over you and you can walk a decent distance on your own.
The sword is heavy in your hands, would be heavy even if you weren’t still recovering. Its blade glints in the sunlight.
(You knew this was coming. Bull heard rumblings and he passed them on to you.
And even if he hadn’t, well, you read a lot. You only hope this isn’t a story where you have to die at the end.)
You scan the crowded courtyard, searching for familiar faces. Of course they’re here. Dalish, Skinner, Rocky, Stitches, Grim, Iron Bull, the rest of the Chargers.
And Krem, standing next to Bull. A smile on his face, wide and proud - just for you.
You’re kind of mad about this, even as you raise the sword to the sky and the crowd erupts in deafening cheers. You liked your life before, small and quiet and comfortable, without quite so many people examining your every move. You miss your friends, you miss him. You’ll return to that, you hope (you have to hope, otherwise you’ll go crazy), once all this is over; once the rifts are closed and Corypheus is dead, you’ll be with the Chargers again and you’ll all leave Skyhold for your next job. Bull probably has it lined up already.
But for now, you’ve been in the war room so long you’ve missed dinner, and even though the cook offers to make you something (you are the Inquisitor, after all, they can’t have you going hungry; you’ll use that perk many nights, but not this one), you shake your head and drag yourself upstairs. Every part of you is tired, and nearly every part of you hurts; you aren’t supposed to be on your feet this much yet.
You almost miss the soft light coming in from the balcony. He’s a soldier, always been good at waiting and doing nothing.
"Thought you’d be at the tavern," you say when you sit down on the blanket next to him.
He shrugs and offers you a plate. Nothing much, just some crusty bread and cheese and an apple, enough so you aren’t sleeping on an entirely empty stomach. "Figured when you’d finally drug yourself back up here you might want some company."
You smile - you thought you wanted sleep, but this is so much better - and lean your head on his shoulder. You’re quiet and still for a while, just breathing. "I love you."
He kisses the top of your head. "I love you too."
***
Crestwood’s drying out - the mayor’s on the run, but the lake’s drained and the rift’s closed and they’ve found Alistair - and they’re camped for the night in a little copse of trees near a small lake on the way back to Skyhold, and they’re all a bit tipsy on the wine Sera swiped from the mayor’s house.
("Shithead tax," she’d said, and stuck the bottles in her bag.)
Kylie watches the smoke from their fire spiral upward into the cloudless night sky. She’d always known the stars were up there, glittering in the heavens, but the astrariums have given her names. Tenebrium, Equinor, Fervenial, she draws the lines with her fingertip.
"Sparks," Bull calls her attention away from the stars and back to the others still sitting around the fire.
She sits up halfway, rests on her elbows. "Yeah?"
"Sera over here was just asking if I’d ever walked in on you and Krem."
She grimaces. A few years between the night with the door with the loose lock and this night have made the experience slightly less embarrassing. Slightly. Bull won’t tell if she won’t, it’s why he brought her into the conversation, but Sera’s shown a remarkable reluctance to give up if she really wants to know something. "Yes," Kylie says, "and we don’t talk about it."
The polite snap of finality in her voice would’ve stopped anyone else, but it sends Sera into hysterics. That’s all she’s going to get out of Kylie, and Bull expertly detours the conversation away from Kylie and Krem and toward imitations of Cullen and Vivienne. Sera’s just drunk enough to follow him, though Kylie doesn’t doubt that somehow, sometime, she’ll manage to drag the details out of someone.
She finds herself not minding too much about that eventuality - while Sera’s relentless and brash, she does have a foggy idea where personal lines are - and lies back down. She folds her hands behind her head, crosses her ankles, and stares up at the sky and stars again. Servani, Eluvia, Peraquialas.
The wine’s put a pleasant buzz through her veins, the night’s warm enough to sleep without tents but cool enough to burrow under into her sleeping roll, and she’s found a spot without any rocks. She drifts off as Sera and Bull try to outdo each other’s stories.
The storytelling continues well into the dawn, and the imitations extend to Solas when he suggests over breakfast that perhaps a different conversation topic might be enjoyed by more of the group.
"No one asked you," Sera says around a mouthful of oatmeal. Once she finishes her bowl, she launches into an incorrect lecture on demons and spirits and Fade creatures that lasts the entire way back to Skyhold. She even has Solas biting back a smile once or twice.
But Kylie’s laughter stops abruptly when Josephine greets them at the gates, report in hand.
***
The night she finds out her mother’s dead, she doesn’t come to you.
Bull’s trying his best to keep her spirits up, but a qunari wake isn’t what she needs and it’s hard to stop one of those once they start. She whispers to you that she’s leaving, and slips away barely noticed by the others.
Solas, you guess she’s going to seek out. Solas or Josephine, but no matter how much Kylie likes Josephine - Josephine’s the one who brought her the news, so your money’s on Solas.
It’s a strange friendship, what she has with the bald elf. You know about strange friendships, and you’re glad she has someone outside the Chargers - someone who hasn’t known her for half her life. He drives everyone else you know a bit nuts, but she likes him. Likes his quiet, likes his solidness, likes his secrets.
She likes people with secrets, you learned early on. She’s not the kind of person who likes people with secrets because she wants to know them, who wants to pry secrets and private things from people who don’t want to give them up. She’s the kind of person who likes people with secrets because it means they’re honest. She’s been traveling with the Iron Bull long enough to know how to spot an honest secret from a dangerous one, how to sift out the people who have secrets because they don’t want to talk from the people who have secrets because they’re trying to get something.
Your own secrets aren’t really secrets anymore, haven’t been for years. But sometimes it’s like a secret, for all that you forget that sometimes it had to be.
It’s nearly morning when she slips into bed beside you. You’ve fallen asleep in her room, unwilling to listen to Rocky’s snores tonight, and she lifts the blankets and tucks against your side. She curls around you, flings an arm across your waist, and tries so very hard to be still and not give away the shake to her shoulders. It takes you a moment to realize that she’s crying.
You’ve never really seen her cry, not in nine years knowing her and five years together. You wake up fully, then, and roll over, gathering her to you as you sit up. She’s so small compared to you, nearly frail when tucked in your muscular arms.
She buries her head in your shoulder and sobs. She’s not seen her mother in sixteen years. The Chargers are her family, you and Bull and Rocky and the rest, but she cries like she’s alone in the world now, without anyone.
You think you understand that, sort of. You’ve not seen your own parents since before you left the Imperium, don’t even know if they’re alive now. But in the back of your mind, they’re alive. If you found out they weren’t, you think you’d probably feel a little like she does now; completely alone, though not at all.
***
She’s asked Josephine to handle it, to make the right choices for how the Inquisition works with her clan. She wants to care, feels like she should care about those choices, but as she stares at the small funeral pyre that can’t even have a body in it, the caring doesn’t come.
She wanted to find them because she wanted to find her mother. The rest of the clan never mattered; they were the ones who made her leave. But the rest of the clan is what she found, the Keeper and the elders who forced her away and even the boy who pulled her hair too many times, and news of a simple death five years gone. She closes her eyes.
The heat stings, but she doesn’t step back. She stays close to the fire, breathes deeply, smells the smoke of burning herbs.
Kylie opens her eyes again and stares into the flames.
"I’ll spare you the details," she says, "but I’m supposed to be saving the world. It’s...weird, very weird, but I’m with friends and a man I love quite a lot, so I’m not alone." Not anymore echoes in her mind, not for years now; Krem had held her close, and then, when her world threatened to feel just a little too unsteady, kissed her cheek and reminded her of everything she already knew.
"And I’m safe. Except for demons - a lot of demons. And Templars, and the Venatori, and this old Tevinter magister god. And possibly an archdemon." She laughs a little and shakes her head. "Not safe at all, actually."
She takes a breath, doesn’t know how to end this, doesn’t know how to walk away. She cried her tears the other night, woke up the next morning to Krem sleeping beside her, his face smushed against the pillow, and smiled; her sadness is distant, quiet again, the way it was when she first joined the Chief. Like it did then, it will eventually fade further, dissolve into the background where she barely notices it.
"We’re leaving at dawn to find the Grey Wardens," she says. "I should probably…" she stops, takes a sharp breath before she turns away. "I miss you," she says, "I’m sorry I didn’t find you again sooner."
She steps away from the small fire and walks along the ramparts to the stairs, down into the courtyard.
***
You walk into the Herald’s Rest just as Maryden starts singing about Sera. You hum along with the first verse while you make your way to the back where your friends are in their usual seats, taking up the tables and booths no one else ever occupies, not even in the day when the tavern is mostly emptied.
The Chief orders another round and you end up on Krem’s lap, watching the Wicked Grace game that’s down to only Dalish, Skinner, and Rocky.
"You okay?" Krem asks lowly, disguising the question with a kiss to your cheek. He alone knew where you were, and why.
You nod and slide your hand to where his rests atop your thigh, and gently squeeze his fingers.
Skinner folds, and in a few more rounds, Rocky triumphantly spreads his cards on the table - three angels, two daggers. His face falls when he looks up and sees the smug grin slowly creeping across Dalish’s face. Full songs in her hand, and he’s lost nearly half the money in his pockets plus a decent amount of ego.
You pat him on the shoulder as he passes you to buy drinks for everyone - loser buys a round, it’s the only rule of the game you know for certain - and offer to play a game with him later. You’re dreadful at Wicked Grace, and everyone knows it, but he could use the confidence boost.
Krem tightens his arms around your waist, a warm hug with strong arms, and you both laugh at Skinner asking Dalish if the crystal helps with cards as well as aiming.
(It doesn’t; the two of you tried that once and all it got you was a scorched deck; but no one else needs to know that)
Rocky returns with ale and Stitches helps the serving girl with the plates and soon you’re all drinking and joking and eating, lost games and funeral pyres all things of hours past. The tavern’s other patrons cast stern looks toward the back corner; you’re louder than normal, all of you, the kind of loud that will spill outside in a few hours and wake up Cullen and cause him to shout something from his window, but this is where you belong. You belong here, you belong with these people. They are your home, your family.